When we discuss the attitude of the middle classes to Socialism we must always bear this keener sense of disconcerting changes in mind. It is a part of the queer composition of the human animal that its desire for happenings is balanced by an instinctive dread of real changes of condition. People, especially fully adult people, are creatures who have grown accustomed to a certain method of costume, a certain system of meals, a certain dietary, certain apparatus, a certain routine. They know their way about in life as it is. They would be lost in Utopia. Quite little alterations “put them out,” as they say—create a distressing feeling of inadequacy, make them “feel odd.” Whatever little enlargements they may contemplate in reverie, in practice they know they want nothing except, perhaps, a little more of all the things they like. That’s the way with most of us, anyhow. To make a fairly complete intimation of the nature of Socialism to an average, decent, middle-aged, middle-class person would be to arouse emotions of unspeakable terror, if the whole project didn’t also naturally clothe itself in a quality of incredibility. And you will find, as a matter of fact, that your middle-class Socialists belong to two classes; either they are amiable people who don’t understand a bit what Socialism is—and some of the most ardent and serviceable workers for Socialism are of this type—or they are people so unhappily situated and so unfortunate, or else of such exceptional imaginative force or training (which is itself, perhaps, from the practical point of view, a misfortune), as to be capable of a discontent with life as it is, so passionate as to outweigh instinctive timidities and discretions. Rest assured that to make any large section of the comfortable upper middle class Socialists, you must either misrepresent, and more particularly under-represent Socialism, or you must quicken their imaginations far beyond the present state of affairs.